Your best guitar-related shop haggles?

TimmyO

Prompted by the thread about private sales, what are your guitar shop haggle success stories? 

(Let's keep it to that, not the ethics of it) 

midlifecrisis

i saw a 2nd hand epi casino / 335 type guitar in a shop, it was priced at £330.   i offered £300, they declined, i left it, got home , thought about it and decided i didnt really want it so i didnt go back.... that to me is  a success story.

sweepy

Usually if they won’t budge on price you can get strings lead etc thrown in 

thegummy

Not so much a haggle but when I was in guitar guitar  the other day for an official neumann and moog product demo. The guys in the shop were wearing very cool Roland t shirts and I jokingly asked if they had any spare and the guy said no but there are moog t shirts and gave me one. Very sound of him.

Regarding actual haggles, my mate's dad got a good deal on an amp which surprised me as I didn't think bartering in big chain stores was still a thing so I'm looking forward to the replies on this thread.

TimmyO

I'm so bad at it (read: it never even occurs to me) that when I was shopping for my acoustic recently I'd mentally discounted the more expensive of them and was starting to umm and ahh about another two - it was the shop owner who broached the subject of being able to do something on price - and long story short I ended up with the pricier one bit for much less than the ticket price 

CMW335

I offered £7k on a guitar priced £10,995 and they accepted!!! Was a consignment which had not shifted for along long time but that set me on the path of vintage guitars 

VimFuego

I used to be really crap at it, but then realised it's mostly a question of going at the right time with the right ''toolkit'' and with a good plan in mind. IME, turning up at 3 in the morning with a crow bar and fast escape route has netted me the biggest discounts. 

thegummy

CMW335 said:

I offered £7k on a guitar priced £10,995 and they accepted!!! Was a consignment which had not shifted for along long time but that set me on the path of vintage guitars 

Jesus, if that's not the winner by percentage it surely will be by actual amount.

What kind of guitar is it?

TimmyO

CMW335 said:

I offered £7k on a guitar priced £10,995 and they accepted!!! Was a consignment which had not shifted for along long time but that set me on the path of vintage guitars 

Wow - that is good! 

Was it seriously "over" priced initially or do you think you stuck a good bargain? 

It reminds me of one time I was in Vintage & Rare in Bath and as I was idly perusing the walls the guy behind the counter was on the phone to someone who it seemed had an instrument in there on consignment which had had an offer on it. The staff member sounded at his wits end apparently explaining to the instrument's owner that it didn't matter how long he was prepared to wait it wasn't going to sell when so over-priced and that the 3 offers he'd had were all reasonable and more normal lol. 

TINMAN82

£2500 for a CS strat marked £2800

£3250 for a Martin 000-28EC marked £3575

£1199 on a USA Firebird marked £1399 (that was a price match).

All online in past 9 months, all kept.

SouthpawMark

At Andertons a couple of months ago i wanted to buy an Empress Reverb pedal. They couldn’t find the box, so they wondered if i would still like to buy it if they reduced the price by £5. Generosity knows no bounds.

I told them to keep looking for it, and 20 minutes later they found it in their pedal cabinet. They still gave me the £5 off for having to wait.

Philly_Q

I'm not a good haggler but I usually give it a try because it seems to be the done thing in guitar shops.

I've managed to get 50 or 100 quid off in store a couple of times.  With a telephone purchase it's usually pretty easy to get free delivery even if they won't budge on the actual base price.  That's about it.

When I bought my Gibson SG-X years ago I asked for a "horrible colour discount" and I think they gave me £25 off.

CMW335

@thegummy @TimmyO ;

It was a 1962 335, stunning it was.

Vintage N Rare is where I got it from lol might have been the same guitar.

It was a dream guitar and value was only hurt by the after market bigsby and the fact it had 2 sticker paf’s with the pat number on the sticker usually this era would at least have one paf without the number and these are more sought after. I sourced an original case and it needed a refret then I sold it on a year later for about £8k which I think is probably about right for it maybe £9k with the case. 

I had another experience with a different store who accepted around £300 off the asking price of a guitar. By pure luck I found the owner and discovered they were skimming the difference off him without his knowledge. Promoted me to post my first thread on this very forum. We got the cash back from the store and I dealt direct with the seller

thegummy

What does one actually say in a big shop?

I'll give you x for that guitar?

TINMAN82

thegummy said:

What does one actually say in a big shop?

I'll give you x for that guitar?

The CS strat mentioned above went like that. I emailed and said “let me know if it drops to £2500 and money ready”. Emailed shortly afterwards with acceptance.

www

I was offered a Fender Vintera 50s Modified Tele on Monday for £799, which i thought was pretty good (retail is £849)

proggy

Me and my mate were looking in a guitar shop window and my mate said, " Look at that sunburst Les Paul, I would love to be able to buy that."

Then I noticed a vintage butterscotch Tele at the back of the shop. I pointed at it and shouted to my mate, "Look, there's the one I'd get."     At that point a fucking huge Cyclops came running out of the shop and punched me straight in the face.

mbe

I got 10% pensioners' discount from Richtone. 

Troglodyte

In one fairly well known store in the south east I was told by a staff member, apropos of nothing, that they were open to haggling in general. Indeed I once got a third off a slightly marked guitar simply by asking.

simonhpieman

Just this minute successfully negotiated getting a certain Marshall amp for £299 instead of £499 at Andertons...

Also got offered a Parker Fly for something like £200 off just by asking to play it in No Tom the other day. I forget the exact figures involved but the owner was there and shouted from the other room as the assistant handed it to me, "I offered that to someone for *x price* the other day so you can have it for that." Quite the wheeler dealer, given I don't think he knew it was a quite rare pre-refined with no trem.

TTony

I bought a Taylor 12 string recently.

~20% off (Taylor seem to have very sticky RRPs), and with a free set of strings too, naturally.

Turns out that they sent it in the wrong gigbag, so Taylor then sent me the correct one FOC, and the original one is now housing another guitar.

Damn fine guitar too (it wasn’t a demo or dinged one).

Happy me.